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Sadly. it's not great. You can do more in Daz Studio than in Unreal at this point. They look to be improving the capabilities in Unreal, but all I see is a lot of running and jumping. They have some physics but still it's mostly a game engine. https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Engine/Animation/Overview/index.html
Most work seems to be done in Maya. More capabilities in Houdini as development has progressed there.
Unreal still excels at their hybrid renderer. But it still has issues with the cranks.
Ok, I have created here an example of a scene rendered in Daz using iray (bunged up the infor in the video, sorry). And that same scene rendered in iclone in real time. in both cases the background is composited in, so the shadows in the iray render are not ideal - where the character is casting onto the medical table in particular. The background render was done in Daz rather than iclone because the iray settings in iclone are kind of crap. I knew something was wrong when I found out that it was impossiblle to do sphere cam renders with their implementation of iray without coding that myself. It's a half developed feature that they charge $100 for. Can't recommend it at this point if you want to do raytracing renders. If you are interested in real time renders like in this video, then iclone would be an excellent choice.
animation is a sloppy mess, I just did this for a test. Some hastilly modified mo-cap animation.
Anyhow, it should be possible to get results like this in Daz without the need for iclone to do animation if the viewport was capable of displaying the scene effectively. All of the bells and whistles that make the scene look great in real time over in iclone are nice, but they are complely unessesary for me personally.
I think commenters on the iClone foum said that Iray in iClone has not advanced since much after it was added. DS has seen more improvements or Iray upgrades.
Viewport tweaks
I've not taken up self made key framed animations too frequently yet because my results aren't good (I'm not counting 3rd party looped animations that have just been retargeted which no surprise, I can retarget someone else's good animation and it still looks good) because I've just been not motivated enough to so without massive amounts of grunt time work which is the only way someone like myself is going to get a decent quality animation. When I have tried to render such in iRay, even at low res, CPU rendering simply takes to log to render even 30 seconds of video to be clean - minie look like they have broadcast noise floating on them.
The new nVidia Omniverse animation AI software and my impending (I hope) purchase of a GeForce RTX 3070 8GB will change the old circumstances I hope but it it's still insufficient rendering there is something new in Eevee for me to use to render clean animations. It's a question mostly of how much Omniverse is going to be able to assist me in animating.
I think things are looking very good for those of use that want to make animations.
I don't even do animations, and at the minimum, I spend at least four times as much time setting up the scene for render, than the render takes. And that was also true back when I had a weak ass 960, it's not just that the 2080 super is darn fast lol. Then I sometimes spend more time than the render took afterwards, doing postwork stuff in photoshop. I can imagine if I actually had to make animations look good it would be like ten times worse with the setup time, probably closer to 50 times lol.
You're taking this awful personally.
Na. I'm just telling it as it is , I do not use 3rd party tools for animation. i do this stuff for fun. I've been working with daz studio and animation a long time. so i have a good grasp what can be done with daz studio, I follow the change logs that are posted for personal interest reasons.. what you posted was not even examples Iray animations, which was your main OP. I just stating what I know to be true using daz studio & I have lots of examples. nothing personal, more like experience.
I may retract what I've said if the Ampere update changes anything. I do not know a lot about this, perhaps I just need to cultive my "delayed gratification" more. I've done Mocap with Iclone and Kinect, I've used the facial mocaps and achieved incredible animations with great visuals - All with Daz Studio. I mean, it looks fantastic. But even with a 2080TI it takes a long time. I've never used any other software before so I do not know the appropriate benchmark to apply.
I like to make animated short films & I have tried & used more than a few 3d apps for animations which i still have in my arsenal like Autodesk 2014, Carrara pro, Blender2.8 ,Poser pro11.3 UE4. with a few landscapes. But I like using daz studio . I am very old school when making animation and Daz works great for my type of creativity. though I do use poser still once in a while & I do use a few mocaps for repetive motions like running ro walking.. But I love the challenge of trying to do everything by hand. its not easy as one would think. to me thats what makes making animation fun. one big main thing making animating with daz studio is the set up prep-work required to get a decent render time. lots of prep but so worth it when i have render time down to 12 second a frame. with 2 -1080ti's. I render in PNG series because it so much easier to throw the images into Photoshop for adding fx or fixing things before using them in film editor to make the animation,. I use Adobe Premiere for my film editor because my cs5 versions still works pretty good & its good at importing large folders with images series. Rendering in image series also allows for much better film editing.. one feature i wish Daz Studio had though was the ability to use movies .MOV or h.265 videos as backgrounds so we could use our 3d figures in real time video like in poser can instead of requiring having to do it in post work. now that be a time saver.
Absolutely. And to let you know - When I compared the other videos, I was not insulting your work. It was completely impersonal, I was comparing render times.
Like you said, Daz yields very good results, I just want to see them in motion.
I did not take your comment as a insult
I have non iray animations that are done with daz studio but using the 3delight render instead still give great results.
like this one . it was 2nd place entry for the renderosity.com Halloween contest a year ago.
Happy Halloween
I have a hard time believing that animation would become boring if you found yourself to be getting significatly better resullts, more often, more easily. No?
This is a bit snide, please take it in good humour. Rather than animating by hand, you could animate bones directly with vector math. It will be 10x more difficult, maybe more. Does that make it more fun? Very serioslly though, vector math is one of the more "fun" areas of math in my experience, from what little I know of it. My suggestion is only a little bit in jest. Maybe check out one or two videos on youtube, it might be something you enjoy quite a lot.
This guy has awesome videos:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9rTsvTxJnx1DNrDA3Rqa6A
I have tried animation using script with MS Visual basics a long time ago but the coding got tedious. & instead of hunting down a mocap for a special move that I know does not exist in the daz store or anywhere else. I give it a try by hand keyframing it and see what I get :)
I do it all the time for my Karate Girl animations because lots of Karate moves i use there is no mocaps for, leaving me to either create my own mocaps or animate the motion by hand & after awhile for lack of the motions capture equipment or lack of aniblocks that don't have the special motions i need, i end up hand keyframing the motion anyway. so if you do that long enough as I have after while you just start doing them by hand rather than rely on premade motion that leave you disappointed most of the time.. its not a bad thing to use premade motions but if they do not exist then what?. and if you do not know how to do basic keyframing by hand it will make animating in any software all the harder.
edited for spelling I am very dyslexic sorry
when I created this animation there were no mocaps for what I needed so I did completely by hand the human body on the bhorse was a little tricky but it took 3rd place 2 years ago in a Halloween contest.
rendered in daz studio with 3delight instead of iray
Happy Halloween
you guys will love this one. when I made this there were no mocaps for what I needed and ended up doing 95% of the motions by hand I made this in 2012 also rendered in 3delight
Its another Halloween one
Black Stone Haunted Castle https://vimeo.com/238211072
I totally agree about keyframe animation being an important skilll. The thing is, Daz is set up in a way to make doing that exceedingly difficult. Even the motion capture stuff in Daz is buggy and hard to use. It's bottleneck after bottleneck all the way through, whatever technique you care to try.
My own efforts with animation in Daz, primarilly keyframed. Frankly, it's total junk, I need to do better. "Sufficient" is a pretty good word for the animation tool set in Daz, if I was being nice. My own skill set as an animator is rather limited as well. Need to improve myself.
I love it
very cool animation
I find the Daz Studio timeline pretty stright forward. I really like the keyframe editor . But i still use keymate a lot which is basicly the same thing. The Daz Ik-chain system is pretty pita, still needs some improvements, or I just need to learn how to use it better. But i do have work around for those solutions.
something i learned a long time ago when I started animating. even whe using other apps. when you do have to make a motion by hand try to always save it as a animated preset and or a BVH file or aniblock specially if its a motion i know i'll be using over a lot like sitting down , or driving a vehicle something like that . in the last 10 years I have saved thousands of animated presets that i can fall back on. so those efforts are for not in the long run.
This is my latest animation I did i try to make it after a old 80's style kung fu movie.
hahah I REALLY liked that! AWESOME work!!
Hmmm, I feel that's the best key framing I've seen completel animated within DAZ Studio yet and I like how you chose the action to avoid the weaknesses of DAZ Studio's animation enviroment.
Does it still take a long time with Free Nomon's tips or have you just not tried them again. I thought you found they work in speeding things up. No need to go with all the still render mania when rendering animations.
I'm just starting to learn how to animate and I have a question for those who have quite a bit of experience with animating in Daz Studio. What tools and add-ons are best to use for animation in Daz Studio?
Also, is AniMate2 needed? Is it the best product for what it does (I'm not even sure I totally understand what it does lol)?
Any advice on products (as well as any tips that might make things easier to animate in Daz Studio), I'm all ears and would love to know. :)
I work from a laptop (though not on animation... that would take more patience that I can ever muster.) However, I can offer hope in the hardware department...
Pricey-as-all-heck but compatible: https://www.newegg.com/asus-model-rog-xg-station-2/p/N82E16814997021 ;
Almost as painful: https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16814986002
Mega-cheap and good-luck-with-that: https://www.newegg.com/p/1DW-0012-00002
Or, they do make laptops nowadays with RTX GPUs (w/ 8GB Ram or so) in them - expect to shell out $2k or more for one...
AniMate2 can be very useful and you should buy it for animation. One of its benefits is it allows layering or stacking of motions which you can't do with the basic version of AniMate (wave while walking, etc.). You can make your own aniBlocks which is good because most that are available are for V4/M4 and earlier versions of Genesis (the old ones can be converted but I haven't tried it.... I think Wendy or Ivy are the experts there. The old tutes are still on YouTube. GraphMate and KeyMate are now in the advanced timeline features as of 4.12.
Wendy is not the expert
I only use Animate to bake aniblocks to keyframes
the free one does that now
and sometimes the mdd exporter Animate 2 has
I actually hate AniMate
Hi Diva,
Animate2 has some features that the animate-lite that comes with daz studio does not. as Kevin mentioned you can stack and edit or create aniblocks with animate2 where the free version those features are locked.. and i use animate mostly for converting older V4 & Genesis motion files and aniblocks to genesis 8 by baking older aniblocks to genesis and using the step up method to genesis8 . Other wise the daz native timeline has come a long way and you can import BVH or Aniblocks into the daz native timeline So animate2 is not really necessary but it very helpful for working with aniblocks
Oh wonderful - I had heard some mention of GraphMate in one of the older animation threads I was reading and it's good to know that that and KeyMate are now integrated into Daz Studio by default. Very cool!
I'll have to see if there are more newer tutorials on youtube for animation - that might be helpful. I watched a couple of the Daz Studio produced ones and they are very helpful! And FAST! The new tutorials get to the point quickly, show you exactly what you need to see, and bam, done. lol The one they released in June on animation using Puppeteer is only 3 and half minutes long, but it is very informative. It made me realize "Wait, animation doesn't look that scary and hard - I should try it." lol
Stacking sound like it's a big help! I have AniMate2 and some aniblocks on my wishlist, I just need it to go on sale at a deep discount. lol While I wait though I'm having fun learning how to work with the timeline and Puppeteer together. :)
Thank you for the great info, Ivy! :)
I think you would be better served by transferring your character to blender and learning to animate there. There are so many more features there that do not exist here. With Daz you will reach a point where you can proceed no further as the software has inbuilt limitations. If you do want to spend money to do animation, look at getting some paid plugins for blender, or have a look at iclone, or literally anything else.
Additional context to the problem. You could spend 100 dollars on a fluid sim here, for example. Or you could spend 200 dollars on a professional quality fluid sim like embergen. The difference in quallity is astounding. The fluid sim here feels like a scam by comparison - no offence to the work that has gone into programming it, which undoubtedly is far beyond my understanding.
edit: seriuosly, I have a lot of admiration for the work that does into getting a fluid sim working, not trying to throw shade here.
Filament has arrived for the beta